


A Favour

by mitzirocker



Category: Twitch Plays Pokemon (Let's Play)
Genre: Gen, archive tag for safety's sake
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-25
Updated: 2016-02-25
Packaged: 2019-10-02 14:05:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17265527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mitzirocker/pseuds/mitzirocker
Summary: Evan is technically still alive. For now, that's enough.





	A Favour

Evan opens his eyes to nothingness, and realises he’s dead. 

He doesn’t know how to react to this. Fair enough, he supposes. It’s not like you die every day.

He looks around - well, not really, if he doesn’t have eyes any more. What happens now?

_You have two choices._

The voice sounds grand, powerful. If Evan thinks of  _turning to face it_  and  _squinting at it_ , he can see…

“I don’t mean to be rude,” he says, once he can make out a shape, “but I thought Death was a bird, not a, um…”

 _Mushroom bug?_ The figure does whatever the spectral parasect equivalent of raising an eyebrow is.  _I am not either of the entities usually called Death. [Realism] is currently out of commission, and its splinter has more urgent duties to fulfil_. _Since I have a passing familiarity with the mechanics of death, after I left my trainer I-_

Trainer. Pokemon. “ _Tux!”_ Evan’s mind races. “Jekyll, Zuckerberg, they were still in their pokeballs!” He should be panting.Why isn’t he panting? “And the Voices, and-and  _Azure_ , I don’t even know if she was on the ship!” Oh yeah, because of the steel door right through his lungs-

The phantom parasect can’t actually slap him, spirits and all, but it certainly feels like she does.  _You are not in pain. You are not in your body. You are dead._

The contrary part of Evan wants to argue about that, but she’s right, and he’s dead. He’ll never meet anyone or see anything or go anywhere again. He can’t even begin to process that, what is he supposed to do now?

Once he can think again, the parasect taps him gently.  _This plane is not as secure as it once was. You must choose a road._

“A road?” He looks around. Still nothing.

 _Or a gate, if you prefer. A destiny. Either_ , she gestures in a direction he can’t name, drawing his attention to an object he can’t describe,  _you may return to the world of the living as a ghost pokemon, or,_  the opposite direction, at a point of nothing that is somehow even more nothing than the nothingness,  _you may move on_.

“Where to?”

_I don’t know._

There’s only one choice, isn’t there? “I’ll be a ghost, please. I need to find out-” but ghosts are lucky to remember their old life at all, and they’ve been known to appear on the opposite side of the world to where they died. “I…” He turns to the parasect. “Please, can’t you send me back to them?”

_No._

“But  _they’re still in their pokeballs_ , I have to save them!”

The parasect gives him a long, long look. Eventually she says;

 _I do owe the Voices a favour_.

* * *

_well he’s dead what clued you in genius was it the bazillion tons of water flooding the ship or the door in his chest_

_guys what do we do now riot apart from that what even happens when our host dies on the job apparently we hover over their corpse and bicker so how’s that any different from usual guys what about our pokemon_

_OH SHIT are there any pokemon centres at the bottom of the ocean what happens when a pokemon gets left in its ball nothing good what about azure CRYOT what about the rockets they need to be stopped don’t they the sea is boriiing team magma 4 lyfe we need a new host why pick a new kid when we have one right here_

_look we beat helix and bill and the glitches didn’t jirachi say they were still out there what does that b-a-start know GUYS if we can do all that we can fix one dead human citation needed do you have any better ideas?_

_so what do we do first get him out of the water no get that hunk of metal out of him no fuse him with azure to make UBER HOST shut up you shut up_

* * *

Cooperating long enough to get Evan out of the wreck turns out to be the easy part.

A few miles off the coast of Johto, in a haze of distortion, the Voices try to figure out how human bodies work. There’s obvious stuff, like ‘no holes in the blood tubes’ and ‘muscles connect to bones’, but they think humans are supposed to be 70% water, and that’s stupid, humans aren’t water type (except Red who doesn’t count), and isn’t there supposed to be salt, guys? They stop work for a week just to argue about how the nasal passages should go, and the low-scale war about what each joint is supposed to do is always humming in the background. The liver has burst, leaking out several important-looking chemicals, and they can’t figure out the branching bits of the lungs, but at least the brain is mostly intact. A vocal minority holds that almost all of their problems would be solved if they just made Evan a cyborg; the usual response to this is to remind them what happened the last time they had a cyborg host, also they don’t know how to build a cyborg either.

Still, they make progress. They put together a mostly-working circulatory system and figure out how many bones there are supposed to be. On the day they’re getting water out of Evan’s ears so they can fit the drumming bones together - there’s a light, and a scream, and their host judders back to life.

* * *

The people of Cherrygrove find the boy collapsed on the beach, unconscious but breathing, skin clammy but slowly warming up. He’s dressed in soaked rags and wears a full pokeball belt.

When he can answer questions again, they ask him what happened. “I don’t remember,” he says, clutching his temples. The purple sparks in his eyes glint off the ice-blue pendant around his neck.

* * *

“How could they be so stupid?!” No one answers Abe, but he doesn’t expect anyone to. The only person who can hear him is Dome, and she’s not exactly sentient at the moment.

He paces around the room that used to be the Hall of Fame before he turned it into a glitchhaze observation station. “How?! How could they possibly think this was a good idea?!”

“Oh, look at us, we’re the Voices,” he says, clapping his fingers together. “We’re so incompetent, we’re fighting something that thrives on broken rules and disturbed routines.” He swivels around to glare at the nearest computer. “So what are we gonna do?”

The monitor shows a boy getting the air (and water) hugged out of him by his crying mother. The glitches crawling up his back are invisible to all but the sensors he’s getting this readout from. For now.

_“We’re going to break the helixdomed rules!”_


End file.
